Thank you for taking the time to provide insight into the decision making process and it completely makes sense that multiple video components showing different calls to action would be a negative experience, which is why a simpler and more organized experience seems great, but the current solution limits the potential for more unique extensions that previously could be one of three video component slots now compete for the single overlay extension slot that is often taken by games like Twitch Sings and it makes lesser-known / 3rd party extensions even less likely to succeed, and that is my biggest concern about this change.
Would users really click an icon of an unrecognized brand / extension? And if every interaction with the component needs an additional click (could this be a hover please?) it adds more barriers for the user to interact with an extension, especially in this 1-click ordering world. Extensions haven’t been around for all that long and even as a developer, I’ve just been getting into extension development in the past couple months since TwitchCon of last year and getting more used to what works and what doesn’t for components vs. panels and been able to start brainstorming better and more ambitious ideas for them and have been absolutely loving the updates to the Dev Dashboard and tools and all that has been going into Extensions, so to have a really big and limiting change like this so quickly when it still feels like Extensions are in the early “I’m rich-app” stages of an app store and developers are just starting to understand what’s possible, is honestly kind of a bummer. If the ultimate goal is to empower the community with new experiences, we need a chance to experiment and try more things before getting literally sidelined, in the same way that indie game developers create new experiences that compete with large titles for their ability to push boundaries in other ways.
Those numbers do seem low with most streamers using just one component extension but it’s not as if they have tons and tons of Extensions competing for that space yet and good component Extension experiences are certainly tougher to design than panels which serve a clear informational purpose, but that’s why I believe they have a much greater potential and that we’ve yet to start to see what can really come from them.